History

As Linda Hughes pointed out in the Michael Wolff Lecture at the 2006 RSVP
Conference and in a 2007 essay, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why
Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies," the
Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals decided to exclude poetry from
their index, so scholars
have lacked comprehensive resources for locating and studying
these texts.

The rationale for excluding poetry from the Wellesley made
sense when that project was conceived in the 1960s. According to Hughes, the shifts
in literary and print culture at the beginning of the twentieth century devalued the
kind of popular poetry found in periodicals. The Wellesley’s emphasis on
provenance also made the work of indexing poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals
exceedingly difficult. As Hughes notes, “Within such a context periodical poetry
could not repay the enormous labor and expense required to trace publication and
authorship, and the Wellesley editorial team confined its labors to prose” (115).
Today, digitized texts and new digital research tools offer new approaches to such
research.

The Periodical Poetry Index offers a valuable resource
previously unavailable to scholars and students interested in the poetry excluded
from the Wellesley 50 years ago by indexing the English-language poetry
published in nineteenth-century periodicals. The research methodology and design of
our project also departs from the Wellesley in primarily focusing on the poem as it is
published in the periodical, rather than author identification and provenance.

The initial version of the
Periodical Poetry Index includes over
2,500 poems from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1900), Cornhill
Magazine (1860-1900), and Macmillan's Magazine (1859-1900),
to be released in several phases. Future versions will index
other titles included in the Wellesley
Index as well as journals not included in that resource.

Early versions of this project were presented at the 2011
Research Society for
Victorian Periodicals conference at Christ Church University and the 2012
Victorian Studies Association of Western
Canada conference at the University of Victoria. This work would not be
possible without the encouragement of Linda K. Hughes, Patrick Leary, and other
members of RSVP. We would also like to thank Michelle Robinson, whose early
project plans offered a foundation for the work we have done.

Research for the Index has relied on free,
web-based resources, specifically Hathi Trust, Google Books, and
Google Forms. The site was constructed in PHP
and MySQL. We welcome comments and feedback about the site at:
editors@periodicalpoetry.org